Wild Harbour (British Library Science Fiction Classics Book 10) by Ian Macpherson

Author:Ian Macpherson [Macpherson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Scotland, scottish, Highlands, dystopia, WW2, future war, Sci-Fi, 1930s, diary, scots
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2019-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

10 July

We have been gathering blaeberries for jam this evening in the birch wood above Loch Coulter. Things ripen late here. We must be thirteen hundred feet above sea-level and the flush of ripe berries will not come for several days yet. Nevertheless we find bushes hung with swollen blue-dusted fruit in sheltered hollows exposed to the south and we have grown prudent enough to gather what fruit we can at the earliest moment of ripening. If rain comes unexpectedly the berries that are ripe will be spoiled for jam. Fruit is not so plentiful that we can afford to let any go to waste.

We were very imprudent lately. When we arrived home from our house, running to escape in broad daylight, we were past caring whether we were seen. And even after we arrived at the cave we continued to act as if nothing mattered except our unhappiness. We went out to cut peats in a rage of energy that proved no anodyne as if there were no other people in the world but ourselves. That first stage passed, yet we grew no more cautious, for we were filled with exaltation as blind as our despair.

I shudder now to think of the risks we ran. We cut our peats at midday. I scoured the country for game at noon. We spent every daylight hour in the open, as if we craved to be discovered.

Clegs were the instruments of caution, and halted our thoughtless bravado. They appeared in the first days of July, before we finished working in the peat-moss. They did not punish me so viciously as they hurt Terry. Their bites raised lumps on her and their poison, together with the aversion they created, made her sick, while I took no great ill-effect from their venom. In spite of my immunity I dreaded them fully as much as she did. They filled me with loathing and, ridiculous as it seems, with fear. A single cleg aiming itself at my arm was enough to make me fling down whatever I had in my hand to beat the insect away with crazy gestures.

The clegs made the moss untenable through the day. Each peat as it dried seemed to make a resting-place for multitudes of the brutes, and at our approach they rose in ravenous swarms. We retreated and ventured out only at dusk when midges made a lesser nuisance, or in the cool of daybreak.

We had been exalted, too highly exalted as we had been too deeply depressed, when we emerged from the misery induced by our journey. The clegs tempered our new delight in the country and in our freedom. When they had driven us to work by night it occurred to us that we should never have been abroad through the day. We had been reckless and foolish. One grey morning, as I was lowering peats in the basket, I bethought me of the risks we had been running, and I hurried down to speak to Terry.

‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked anxiously, coming to meet me.

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